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5 Tips on New Year’s Resolutions…

Tip #1: Don’t just think about a list of goals. Think about the reasoning behind a specific goal. If you’re going to make them, make them for the right reasons. Making New Year’s Resolutions because it is the start of a new year probably isn’t good enough.

Tip #2: Choose goals that you are passionate about, not goals that you think will impress people. Goals that fit you and that are personal are more likely to “stick” over the months. Goals that set to impress other people tend to fade when the other people stop giving you attention for setting the goals in the first place.

Tip #3: Set goals based on an outcome you want. I eventually want a journal that is full of both the large and small events in my life and a journal that is written in regularly. So I set the goal to write in my journal 50 times over the course of the year, envisioning a journal that has weekly updates. When I don’t really feel like writing, I picture my children reading over my journal and being impressed that I wrote so consistently. It helps me stick to my goal.

Tip #4: Don’t be afraid to alter your goals if your vision expands or changes. If you get half way through the year and realize that you can improve on the goal you originally set, do it. Use your momentum to improve. But, if halfway through the year you feeling like lowering your expectation of your self, see Tip #3.

Tip #5: Go read this short post on Michael Hyatt’s Blog. It is one of the best posts about goal setting I’ve read in a long time.

My Public 2010 Goals:

Write 50 journal entries over the course of 2010. Continue using Google Docs as my journal.

Exersise 3x a week, at least 40 weeks this year. Use iFitness to keep track.

Study landscape photography on the web, and produce ten images that aren’t portrait images in 2010.

Brian, your earlier posts about creativity on FB inspired me to make that my number one goal this year. I hope to ressurrect the creative side of myself that I’ve let slip away over the last few years being busy with callings, motherhood, etc. And I even decided to schedule that time each week as an appt with myself so that I can’t make excuses about why I didn’t do it. So far so good… but it’s still January…🙂